I Impersonated A Chick On Craigslist Casual Encounters

After reading Exploring Online Hookups on the rabbitwrite blog, I was inspired to experiment with Craigslist Casual Encounters. I’ve actually had a bit of success with Casual Encounters in the past. Four years ago I went on a few dates with a model I met on CL when I was living in Tennessee. We had a great time but it went nowhere. Four years ago is a long time in CL world and I know it’s changed a lot since then. I wanted to revisit and see what the landscape was like.

The first thing I did was post a W4M ad in the Casual Encounters section of CL. If you’re not familiar with Casual Encounters, it’s the most entertainingly smarmy corner of the Internet. Ads from men and women, or what you think are men and women, are posted on a daily basis offering up no-strings-attached (NSA) encounters and hookups. Ads are usually 1-2 lines long and occasionally come with a pic, but usually not.

First, I posted an ad posing as a woman looking for a NSA encounter. I did the W4M ad to see what kind of response I would get and to sort of get the female perspective. I also posted an ad as a guy looking for the same, and will share those results in a second post.

Here’s my ad, click to expand:

A couple of notes:

I put in a few details that I thought seemed real, ie the city Orlando, her age (39), and her desired age range.

Acronyms: SWF = single white female, DDF = drug and disease free. There are TONS of acronyms on CL dating and I had to look most of them up in the urban dictionary.

The Results

The results, while not totally unexpected, were still mind blowing. In less than four hours, I received 87 emails, where only two of those were from obvious spammers (one with laptop links and the other for a swingers party at club). Of those 85 remaining dudes, 48 of them attached pictures, and 21 of those had dick pictures.

Many of the emails included basic stats like age, height, weight, race, location, and some of the emails contained only those stats and no other information. Age ranges were between 21 – 46. The guys came in all shapes and sizes. Some of them were married. Many of them thoughtfully included their full names and phone numbers.

Here’s a screenshot of a section of my inbox box just to give you an idea:

Takeaways For Her

It took me awhile to process all this, but here are some thoughts.

Most of the guys appeared to be real guys responding to an ad for a dirty hookup, so I’m not surprised that many of the dudes sent pics of their cocks. I can’t really blame them. What did surprise me were how many of these guys seemed like perfectly normal, decent looking, even clean cut dudes. Like, regular joes just looking to get laid. I imagine many of these guys also have Match.com accounts and look for dates that way. If I was a real chick looking for a hookup with a legit dude, I could easily leverage this system to get it.

For example, check out this guy. Looks like a reasonable, normal dude, right?

It was hard to filter all the emails because they came on so fast and furious. If you post a couple of times, you will literally get hundreds of emails. I do think that writing a longer, well thought out ad would accomplish some filtering because you would get a few guys to respond in kind, but that seems out of place in the Casual Encounters environment. There are simply no well written ads in this space. Besides, why bother? The guys are going to write you regardless of what crap you put out there. I could have set up 10 dates over 10 nights and it would taken me less than an hour if I wanted.

Of course, setting up dates off a CL ad is super sketchy and there’s a qualification process that needs to take place before the meetup. As a chick, you need to determine if the guy you’re emailing is indeed a real guy, safe, DDF, willing to be discreet, and then work out a system where you can do a face-to-face meetup and work out logistical issues and not get your ass killed in the process.

If you’re a chick and you post a NSA hookup, do you invite the guy directly to your house and just go at it, or do you meet in a neutral location first, have a qualification convo, and then close the deal? If I was a chick, working through that would scare the fuck out of me.

Last tip, and this is a weird one, but if you post an ad, expect it to get flagged as spam within a few hours. If you’re not familiar with this function, anyone browsing CL ads can flag an ad as spam, which means your ad will get removed in short order. I’m not exactly sure why this happens, but I think a lot of guys get frustrated and flag you if you don’t respond. My ad was flagged and removed after four hours. I’ve seen a few chicks re-posting their ads in W4M and asking the readers to specifically not flag them because they are, in fact, real.

Takeaways for Him

I have two big takeaways for the fellas who are checking out ads in the W4M section:

1. It’s super competitive. You are literally competing against 100s of guys, where all of them are emailing within a few hours of each other. I had dozens of emails within MINUTES of my post going live.

What lowers your odds even more is that very few of the ads represent legitimately attractive women. If I had to handicap it, I’d say your odds are less than 0.05% of scoring a cool hookup this way. The flipside is that it takes little time or energy to respond.

2. Most of the ads are fake and coming from spammers and scammers. I’m going to followup on this and explain fully. But, here’s an example of a fake ad:

This one is obviously fake. Note the shitty headline and the hilariously bad body text. I mean, really? I see dozens of these ads flow through each day in Casual Encounters and they’re all designed to either get your email address or take you through a process to extract money from you. Some of them are automated. It’s ingenius and sinister. That’s the game on CL these days. It’s a shadowy dungeon filled with pits, monsters, and booby traps.

Final Thoughts

At first, I wanted to get pissed about how easy it is for chicks to use something like CL to get dates and get laid, but there’s no reason for that. Even if she’s getting 100s of emails, it’s still dangerous and the likelihood of her having a good experience out of it are pretty slim. But, like any other online dating system, chicks can use this to get whatever they want if they know how to navigate it properly. Personally, I think it’s more efficient to leverage a system like Match.com if you’re a dude looking for NSA sex. Yes, it costs more, but nothing that will break the bank.

Guys, stop sending pictures of your penises to women! It’s terrible game and will get you nowhere.